Hearts determined to halt Dons juggernaut

Robbie seeks scalp of leaders at fortress Tynecastle

IT’S one thing turning it on when there’s not a seat to be had in the house and the eyes of the nation are fixed upon you. To roll up again three days later when the legs are heavy and the atmosphere is flat — only to emerge with the same result — is quite another.

Aberdeen may have earned more plaudits f or beating Celtic l ast weekend than they did for seeing off Hamilton in midweek, yet, in Robbie Neilson’s eyes, the latter triumph was — if anything — more impressive.

The Hearts head coach, who welcomes the Dons to a sold- out Tynecastle tomorrow, always felt the sterner test of Aberdeen’s title credentials lay not so much in reaching the summit of the Premiership but by then consolidating their position.

Now, faced with a side who have swept all before them in their opening seven matches, Neilson sees no reason to believe that the men from the Granite City do not have the wherewithal to take the title race to the wire this term.

‘I was at Aberdeen’s game against Hamilton and they won, even though they didn’t play well. That’s the sign of a decent team,’ he said. ‘They win games and win ugly. There’s a belief in the team and when they played against Hamilton, they didn’t play well but picked up three points and they need to continue doing that.

‘If you want to challenge at the top of the league against Celtic, then you have to win just about every game.

‘You need to go away from home and win games. You have to go to Hamilton and win and Kilmarnock and win. These are difficult places to go and win.’

He might well have a dded Tynecastle to that list. Although his side have lost their last two league games to Hamilton and Inverness, they retain an unblemished home record. Last season only Falkirk won in Gorgie on league business.

For all Aberdeen will arrive in the capital with the momentum of a juggernaut, the Dons haven’t claimed an away league victory over Hearts in more than five years.

‘They’ve not won here for a long time so, hopefully, we can continue that,’ added Neilson.

‘They’re on a good run of form but they’ll know they’re not going to go t he whole season undefeated. Everyone is looking to try to be the first team to beat them, so they have become a scalp. We want to be that team.

‘We felt that at the start of the season. You can tell teams want to beat you when you’re winning every week. Hearts, Aberdeen and Celtic are teams that others always want to beat anyway. That comes with the territory.’

Those recent back-to-back losses on the road may have been bitterly disappointing for Neilson, but they were hardly unexpected. Despite seeing his side’s imperious Championship-winning form spill over into the opening five games of their Premiership campaign, the head coach always knew that a hump in the road was coming.

‘We are a Championship team that got promoted in the summer,’ he stressed. ‘We have had five wins out of seven and that’s a decent start for a team that’s just come up.

‘Yeah, we want to be near the top of the league, but a couple of years ago we were sitting here and the club was nearly out of business.

‘So we have to be realistic and progress slowly. We aren’t going to jump straight from being in the Championship to being top of the league.

‘We are probably ahead of where we should be. The Championship was a two-year plan to get out but we made it back in a year.

‘The plan wasn’t that after a year and a half we would be sitting top of the Premiership. So we still have a lot of hard work to do.’

Neilson will decide whether to offer Belgian trialist Arnaud Djoum a deal over the weekend and expects to be able to call on Morgaro Gomis despite the midfielder losing his father last week.

For Dons midfielder Kenny McLean, the feeling that his side are becoming the scalp all other sides want is growing by the week.

‘I’m sure everyone wants to beat us and Hearts will want to be the first team to take something off us,’ said the midfielder.

‘But the way we are playing, we go into every game with confidence that we can get the three points and that will be the feeling at Tynecastle.

‘The run were are on gives us a lot of confidence as the three points we got against Celtic were no different to the ones we got by beating Hamilton.

‘It’s all the same in that respect but beating Celtic was always going to be big for us, especially the way we did it.

‘That shows how well we are playing at the moment and we go down to Tynecastle just trying to better that again.’

The Dons will be forced into at least one change from the team that beat Hamilton after Jonny Hayes lost his appeal against the straight red card he was given against Celtic.

Assistant manager Tony Docherty expected the midfielder to be cleared but insists his absence gives another member of a strong squad the chance to shine.

‘Everyone knows what Jonny Hayes brings to the team,’ he said. What that does is it gives an opportunity for someone else.’